The slippage here is multivalent-of one image (the photograph) into the painting, but also of a particular moment in geometric abstraction into the larger history of Modernism.
Every work has a back story.” He refers to Malevich’s manifesto-like presentation in Petrograd as “the putative Ur moment of abstraction.” The second painting Diao made after a hiatus of several years in the early 1980s, its title refers to the philosophical concept of slippage found in the writings of Lyotard and Derrida, then beginning to be widely read in American universities. Diao would go on to make many variations of Glissement, alternately reconfiguring it to be hung in a corner like the one depicted in the Malevich photograph, separating and stacking the forms into an assemblage nodding to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, using newspapers in different languages to represent the canvases, and adding back the Thonet chair which was in the source photo (Black and White with Chair).Īlthough Diao continues to consider himself an abstract painter, after 1984 he “no longer made paintings that referred only to themselves. Based on the 1915 photograph of Kazimir Malevich’s first intensely spatial installation of his own Suprematist works in “The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10”-an image included in nearly every history of abstract art-Diao’s painting distills the installation to a collided constellation of flat shapes floating in space, some showing the contours of the paintings rendered in trapezoidal perspective, others showing only the forms present on the canvases without the outline of the stretcher itself. In Glissement, Diao makes his explicit first reference to the history of Modernism, appropriating, abstracting, and redeploying an image that documents one of that history’s key moments.
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